By David Pierce
Publication Date: 2025-12-07 14:17:00
Google didn’t invent the concept of smart glasses, but it did help make them mainstream. In retrospect, 13 years after their launch, this is both a good and bad thing. Glass made a lot of people dream about new ways to use computers without staring down at screens all day. Glass also made a lot of people realize just how bad it might feel to have a world full of face computers. Which is more predictive: Glass, or Glassholes? And can you even have one without the other?
For this episode of Version History, we go back in time and tell the story of Google Glass. David Pierce, Victoria Song, and tech journalist David Imel trace the product’s beginnings in a moonshot lab in Mountain View, through their incredible cultural impact, the absolutely immediate backlash, and ultimately their surprisingly quick death. Well, not exactly death. Glass didn’t go away when you might think… and it’s already sort of back.
This is the first episode of season two of Version History. You might…
